I am a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. I am the director of Diversity Limited, a business that is a vehicle for my work in investment, advice and consultancy. Diversity has holdings in manufacturing, property and technology companies and undertakes advisory work. For my complete disclosure statement, click here. I have a background across various industries, owning businesses in the manufacturing, property and technology sectors and make my day to day living consulting to technology vendors and customers. I cover the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. My areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

Box, Metadata, dLoop And A Taste Of Things To Come

At Boxworks, the Box user conference earlier this year, the company announced Metadata – a service that received significantly less attention from the press covering the event than its importance deserved. (Disclosure, Box contributed towards my expenses to attend the event). While Box Notes (see my previous coverage here) was an easy thing to write about, Metadata is, in my mind, a far more important announcement. Essentially Metadata allows data about documents within Box to be captured. Have no doubt about it, we’re seeing the start of a more credible differentiation between Box and it’s traditional on-premises competitors (in particular SharePoint from MicrosoftMicrosoft). From the release:

add new data types and information to the content stored in Box. The underlying technology allows users to add key:value pairs to files stored in Box via the API or web app, making it easy to add, edit and view additional types of information around a file from within a custom app or on Box. Companies can now integrate Box easily into their existing infrastructure and workflows with more options for what information can be stored alongside files.

Box gave a couple of examples of how Metadata could be used in action:

Security policy – Metadata could detect a credit card number within content in box and, in the case that a credit card-containing document was identified, mark as quarantined

More of a workflow proposition – when a document is uploaded to a draft press release folder for example, tasks would be assigned to the head of marketing to approve the release. When approved the file would be moved to the approved folder

Around the time of BoxWorks, the company wrapped up the acquisition of the still-in-stealth startup dLoop. dLoop was a content discovery platform created by Divya Jain, a content and data mining veteran. The company built some technology which used machine learning algorithms and graph analysis to identify similarities between different items of content – it’s an answer to the problem of wanting to surface relevant content without relying on accurate user searches. dLoop helps Box deliver on the broader opportunity that metadata is trying to solve – ensuring context and relevancy for users of the Box platform.

At the event I spent time talking with a couple of Box customers, one very large enterprise and one SMB customer, about the value that Metadata could bring. I’ll cover their use case and then point out where I believe Box should (and will) take the product.

The SMB Value Prop – Automated Workflows

The SMB customer I talked to is a smart boutique development consultancy. They already use a plethora of cloud/SaaS services, many of which are already integrated together. The opportunity they identified in the discussions I had with them prior to the Metadata announcement, was the automation of workflows within their organization. As an example they talked about the ability to trigger certain workflow events within their CRM or financial application depending on Box content – say a client signed a contract with a cloud signing product to EchoSign. With Metadata and some sort of workflow builder, this could trigger a series of actions – perhaps the change of an opportunity status within the CRM and the creation of a draft invoice within the financial application.

For SMB customers, the primary value from Metadata is around the triggering of workflows – it’s the sort of value proposition that financial software vendors (here’s looking at you IntuitIntuit) SHOULD be delivering but are not.

The Enterprise Value Prop – The Big Data Insights

At the risk of spinning off a couple of buzzwords, the real value for large enterprise is in the insights that can be gained from Metadata – the customer I spoke to is in the industrial sector – for them there would be significant value in creating and tracking metadata across the entire organization, and inferring patterns from that data. By inferring these patterns, the organization could then identify anomalies and see when something unusual happens – perhaps an unusual sequence of document access, a pattern of document editing that falls outside usual bounds, or an unusual spread of documents access across the organization.

This sort of use case seems very analogous to what the IT logging analysis vendors are doing – I’ve recently written about both Loggly and SumoLogic who provide these sort of metadata services for IT systems log files. In order to deliver this value proposition however, Box needs to think about the way it delivers the Metadata product, more on that below.

MyPOV

The announcement of Metadata is an incredibly important one for Box, but the product that was shown at Boxworks is underbaked in terms of delivering the value. In its beta form, metadata relies on the creation of user generated metadata – so customers have to manually assign the metadata classes across their documents, and then manually enter the actual metadata for each document. This feels very much like an old school method of doing things and I put this to CEO Aaron Levie in a Q&A session after his keynote. I suggested to him that since organizations fundamentally don’t know the insights that they’re looking for, the fact that they have to define and enter the metadata themselves means that they’re less likely to bubble up insights from the data. I suggested to him that an offering whereby Box could ingest all the content of the files a customer stored within their Box account, and run an analysis to determine what metadata is of note. This is absolutely where the later-announcement of the dLoop acquisition comes in.

It’s worth mentioning that the log analysis vendors already do this (see Anomaly Detection from SumoLogic) so in my view it’s much less of case of the technology not being there, but more about taking enterprise customers on a journey to understanding the value that metadata can bring – rushing in too early with the technology before customer maturity is broadly there would be a strategic blunder and I’m sure Box is taking this into account.

Metadata generally will become a core requirement of modern applications – it’s good to see Box starting the conversation with their customers.

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. Read more about Ben here.

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